


Presence

by cruisedirector



Category: Dawson's Creek, The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981)
Genre: Artists, Canonical Character Death, Colors, Community: contrelamontre, Crush, Decisions, Episode: s01e10 High Risk Behavior, Episode: s06e24 All Good Things Must Come To An End, F/M, Female Friendship, Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Growing Up Together, Introspection, Love Triangles, Masturbation, Multiple Endings, Orgasm, Painting, Polyamory, Post-Finale, Power of Words, Teenagers, Writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-11-18
Updated: 2005-11-18
Packaged: 2017-10-03 07:18:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruisedirector/pseuds/cruisedirector
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the funeral, Joey tries to figure out some means of telling Pacey and Dawson what she really needs to say.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Presence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [karelian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/karelian/gifts).



> _Dawson's Creek_ belongs to the WB. Kevin Williamson owns the series and especially the title character. Warning: Finale spoilers. This fic is remixed from one written in a different fandom for the Contrelamontre color (white) challenge.

After nearly a year the canvas is still blank, with only a tiny smudge of gold-yellow-brown in the lower corner where Joey once tried to get the color right. She couldn't, though, because Jen's hair looked different under different light. It was dirty blonde in the sun, with light browns rather than reds beneath the fair highlights, but in the muted fog by the creek it grew stringy and dark, streaking to the color of mud. Maybe so many years of not practicing her art have left Joey unable to mix colors as she once did, never with the greatest of confidence, but at least as a teenager she had had the confused feelings of adolescence as an excuse. And she had never tried to paint Jen Lindley.

The eyes had been a conflict too. Jen's were hazel, sometimes green, sometimes brown, with flecks of blue when a glittering disco ball or amusement park neon reflected from them. How had Joey wanted to capture them when she last picked up this canvas, the one she'd picked out for the Jen painting, based on a series of small imperfections like ruffles where the fabric wrapped around the back, which made it prettier and rougher around the edges than all the typical canvases in the store?

Maybe instead of trying to paint, considers Joey, she should take a photo of that corner of the canvas and make a collage of her photos of Jen, most of which are slightly blurred copies of originals taken by Dawson or Jack plus a few screen caps she and Pacey made from their videotapes of Dawson's home movies. None of the photos have captured whatever it is that Joey is attempting to get at in painting Jen. She picks up a brush with eggshell-white, paints an uneven stripe on the duller bleached canvas. Isn't sure what she's trying to say. Puts the brush down again.

On canvas, white is the absence of another color, but in a prism, white is all the colors blended until they're indistinguishable. (Snow on the creek. Clouds that might break into rainbows. The explosion behind her eyelids the first time she had an orgasm, with Dawson's name on her lips, biting down on her other hand to stop herself from crying out.) This canvas is marked now, not blank. The Jen Painting. It's like looking at a book without an ending.

Joey has tried to write about Jen -- about everything that happened and never happened -- but she can't find phrases for some of what she means, and there are things she could yet doesn't want to name. Dawson, of course, has made them all famous on his television show, and he's the one they all think of as the writer, but working as an editor has made Joey conscious of all the different ways a story can be told and how sometimes what the author thinks is the best, clearest, fairest way to describe someone won't necessarily make the reader understand the character any better.

She thinks not much of the fiction she writes is publishable -- she's not Eddie Doling, who has now published three novels and who never forgets to call when he's in town, even though he didn't bother to thank her in the lengthy acknowledgments of that first novel where he declared undying gratitude to Greg Hetson. Joey knows that her fiction is too wordy and sounds too much like herself -- esoteric words and sarcastic wit, like her conversations with Dawson where words were sometimes weapons, not really getting at the heart of what she wants to say because what she wants to say is so trite and unimpressive. Yet she wants to see the stories in print anyway, as if the solid presence of a book might confirm realities that otherwise would exist only in her mind. Dawson has his version on the screen, but his wasn't the only reality. Maybe Joey wants someone else to read her side of the story. To help her finish it.

And maybe she can't work on this painting because it's incomplete. Or maybe it's because she prefers to think of it as incomplete. The current unspoken agreement among herself, Dawson and Pacey (to leave things as they are) is the opposite of a resolution. Dawson wrote the ending she had always known he wanted on his series, but like in _The French Lieutenant's Woman_, it's as if there's the official, sanctioned, socially pleasing conclusion and then the messier, unresolved real-life conclusion that might not be the very end of the story. Smiling, Joey remembers watching the movie version with Dawson, as he insisted that the historical happy ending made more sense to the story in every way and the writer had just tacked on the woeful finale as a cop to contemporary critics while she argued the opposite, that he had written the expected Victorian ending before deconstructing it and revealing his true cynicism.

In eggshell-white Joey brushes a few swirls, the curls of dirty-blonde hair. She paints a phone number on the canvas, then crosses it out with sweeping slashes of the brush. Thinks of painting the canvas blue with a gold-yellow-brown comma in the lower corner. Thinks of writing a name in white, then painting over it in every other color, and then covering the whole thing in black to see if current absence erases the memory of light.

If there's one thing she learned from Jen, it's that you never know how quickly it might all end, and what if you had been too scared to make the right choice, even if the right choice would have thrown everyone's life into complete turmoil? What if she had said "both" -- would she have lost them both? Or was there enough love, in those days after the funeral, to bind them all together again? It had been enough for Jack and Doug, for Gayle and Stan, but without Jen in the equation, would there ever again be enough for herself and the only two men she has ever fully loved?

Joey realizes that she can't work on the painting today. She lifts the canvas, leans it back against the wall where it has stood for months...where she can always see it staring at her the way she imagines Jen's open, dead eyes that will never see Amy grow up. She needs to finish this, to bring closure to the saga she's too scared to write of herself and Dawson and Pacey. She told Jen that she's always known who she wanted, and her dying friend hadn't been at all surprised. Hadn't even been jealous, even though it was so greedy of Joey Potter to want so much. Jen had told her all the reasons it was the right answer.

For Joey, Jen's death was not an ending but a transformation. Whatever colors she puts on this canvas will be as well, when she's ready. If she's ever ready. If not, she will keep it white, The Jen Painting. Presence of light, presence of color. Presence.


End file.
